An API for GitHub Actions has been released in a public beta. The Actions API provides a way to manage GitHub Actions via a REST API, with facilities for handling workflows, repository secrets, artifacts, and self-hosted runners.

GitHub Actions is designed to help developers build, share and execute code directly on the site. It is designed to cut down on the steps necessary to execute code. The Actions team say when they first shipped it, they knew a key feature was missing for platforms, an API.

The API can be used to read workflow run and job data, and lets you find out about information including outcome, conclusion, and timing using the workflow run and job API. There's also a secrets API that can be used to automate secret management on your repositories. This is designed for teams with a large volume of repositories to provide a way to implement best practices like secret rotation and to write integrations that automatically provision secrets.To ensure that secrets are kept secure, the API doesn’t return any values, only names, and the secrets have to be encrypted with a public key before setting them, which means they’re never logged in the GitHub infrastructure.

An artifacts API is also part of the beta. This can be used to download an archive of an artifact from a workflow. Support for working with self-hosted runners is also included, meaning you can run Actions on your own hardware. Until recently, these runners had to be manually set up individually. With the API, developers can automate the registration and removal of their runners by creating registration tokens and passing them to the runner configuration script.

The Actions API is  API is available on GitHub for authenticated users, OAuth Apps, and GitHub Apps.

More Information

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions API

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